DebbyIan wrote:A generic question if I could pick on some of the knowledge and experiences here. With sub-pixel rgb rendering, ought to one be tripling the overall dpi resolution as well? The Xft.dpi value for Xorg.

i think you will notice the difference (HUGE fonts) so why not just try it?

I did but then you decrease the font size. But is tripling the dpi resolution the right thing to do? Whichever way you look at it scalable fonts never seem as sharp as bitmap fonts. There's always the overhanging issue of blurring and/or color fringing. Another issue is the way glyphs fade from their stem to a light gray at certain regions.

^ depends on screen resolution.also some of the inifinality settings have now been taken over to the "normal" freetype packages, but it seems they still need some manual configging. i know at least the color fringing can be tweaked away almost compltely.

The article on phoronix.com has some useful (and simple) info on the subject, while the files on sourceforge.net are just the sources to build the documentation of freetype and they do not even contain a changelog or something similar.

I compiled last vanilla FreeType release, I didn't test the appearance of fonts very well, but I found with slight hinting a little improvement (maybe with full hinting it is better).Also, last version of HarfBuzz is present.Changelog: https://sourceforge.net/projects/freety ... type2/2.8/

I found 2.8 with medium hinting and lcd-default offers the best font rendering I have seen so far. Fontconfig is from Experimental. I enabled FT_CONFIG_OPTION_SUBPIXEL_RENDERING and used Infinality style.

Building was easy. Just use checkinstall and create a dummy package for libfreetype6-dev. Packages are here if you want to use them: https://ufile.io/0mekx But you should build them yourself, there is no reason to trust me.

Settings could be tweaked to one's wit end. But if the fonts aren't well hinted in the first place then there's little point in going mad with settings. I'm finding some issues with fonts in the Debian repos. I'm having to download the very same font families from fonts.google.com instead and getting marginally (marginally) better results.